Broken Streaks
by berryfuls
Summary: Nick reflects on some streaks he's broken in the past couple months. Spoilers for 5.1-5.3.


**Just a little something from 5.3 because Nick is sad and sad is fun to write. Spoilers for season 5 ahead. Enjoy!**

* * *

First, he lost Andy McNally because she still loved Swarek. Okay, he probably should have seen that one coming. He couldn't blame the guy for wanting her back, though. She was smart, funny, beautiful… perfect. Before the shooting, he thought maybe they'd be able to get past the whole Swarek thing. That maybe she'd realize that she was better with Nick than she ever was with Sam, and/or he'd get so tired of the pain that he'd leave. Nick would never have been petty enough to have ever admitted that he would have won in either of those circumstances, but honestly, he would have felt that way.

However, she realized her feelings for Swarek and now he was alone in this cell-like room, reliving the gut-piercing suffering of seeing her walk in the door next to _him._ If only it had been anyone else. Dov, Chris, Oliver, even _Luke. _(To be fair, he didn't get all the gruesome details of what went down between Andy and Luke, only the little bits that he had gotten from Gail that one time she gossiped about all her friends and it came up.)

It had to have been Swarek. Who else would it have been?

Which brings him to his next broken streak, that of Fite Nite: he was the first rookie from 15 to lose in the past sixteen years.

He was a good fighter. Everyone knew that. But even before Andy had walked in with _him_, he had been distracted. He barely threw any punches and instead let himself get beaten down. He wasn't about to be all melodramatic and say, "The pain of losing her was more than the physical pain," because getting punched all over your body really does hurt. Seeing her walk in with Sam was a different kind of pain and maybe it was too much for him to handle. Maybe that made him succumb to 34th's rookie. His body was bruised and bleeding, but that is treatable. Throw a steak on it, and it'll be fine. There's not much to do for a broken heart besides eating chocolate and listening to Taylor Swift, and he wasn't about to lower himself to do either. (He does have some standards.)

Truth be told, he didn't really care about the Fite Nite broken streak. He figured that he'd get bagged on it for a few months and then everyone would be distracted by some new drama that would take the focus away from him. It was survivable. It was merely a mild nuisance that would last as long as the attention span of the division. In any other situation, he probably would have played along, laughing with everyone else at his incapability. He could see Traci teasing him about breaking the streak she helped put in place, and Oliver would act as if Nick was some delicate flower.

But they knew. So they didn't tease him. No one said anything. They knew that Andy had chosen someone else and he was hurting over losing her. He hadn't just lost a friend; he had lost the love of his life, even if he had never told her how much she really meant to him. The brotherhood had his back, even if that meant looking bad to all the other divisions.

It was strange how everyday he walked into the precinct, 15 looked less and less like the home he had originally thought it to be. He would take the long way to get from parade to the parking lot, just so he wouldn't have to walk in the footsteps Andy took to Sam's side. He would avoid the places he could vividly remember being with her, just so the cold, vacant spot beside him didn't freeze him to the bone. The entire building was filled with the ghost of her and them, and there was no escape.

Every broken streak he'd encountered because of her… They were nothing to him. Streaks were just periods of repeated success. Immaterial. Nothing even came close to the shards of how much he cared for her and how they sliced at every organ in his body.

But she was happy. She was happy with him. That's all he could ever ask for.

And as he's suffering over losing her, maybe he sees her smile. And that makes him smile, too.


End file.
